Mark Stewart turns quite a few heads as he zips through the streets on his neon green ELF bike. With each pedal, his feet take turns sticking out from the bottom while a gentle motor hums in the background.
What he’s driving looks like a cross between a bicycle and a car, the closest thing yet to Fred Flintstone’s footmobile, only with solar panels and a futuristic shape.
It’s a “green” option for today’s commuters.
Stewart, a 65-year-old family therapist and school psychologist from Cambridge, Mass., took the summer off in order to drive his new ELF bike more than 1,200 miles on trails and roads using the East Coast Greenway, a bike and pedestrian trail that runs from Canada to Key West.
He began his journey by flying down to Durham, N.C., on July 15, and estimates that the entire trip will take about a month. He covered the first leg, from Durham, N.C. to Reston, Va., over roughly five days, 60 miles at a time.